The Ironic Eternity of Objects in Dubravka Ugrešićʼs The Museum of Unconditional Surrender

Dubravka Ugrešićʼs The Museum of Unconditional Surrender is a melancholy text of nostalgia-inflected memory that communicates experience and narrative through material objects (socialist era paraphernalia, for example). Such projects can be perceived as trivial in their encounter with history because they commodify knowledge of the past without being critical of the foundations of their memory. This article traces how these anxieties and questions about value – monetary, historic, aesthetic – are embedded within Ugrešićʼs novel through the literary idiom of flânerie. Walking the streets of Berlin is less about acts of remembrance than the provenance of the narratorʼs own labour. By examining these depictions of the writerʼs industry, this essay highlights the processes by which aesthetic and mnemonic properties are discovered (or recovered) in order to give value to socialist ruins, memorabilia and commonplace objects.